So, I’ve finally gotten done what I’ve been thinking I should do the last few years: actually publish music. Publish in the sense of putting music out there for sale, and for streaming, on the major services for those purposes. I had always held back as I was thinking “I should compose a good/great album first and THEN release it”, but was told by friends “that is not how it works these days, just release your songs, do the rest later”. So I did, if nothing else to see if I could turn it all into a sort of experiment, where I can document how it works, both for myself and my own entertainment, but perhaps also for the benefit for someone else. I basically took a song that I had lying around, for which I also had a “cover” image done (which is a requirement).
This is what I’ve done so far:
Distrokid
Having compared a couple of services for publishing music I decided to go for Distrokid. Basically the price ($20/year for unlimited uploads) along with pretty relaxed rules in general, without dependency on anyone else for me personally, made me decide for it. For now, it seems perfect. Simple sign-up process, where you basically need an e-mail account and a credit card.
I figured I should take it even further: I release my music under the artist name “Ayepad” (like in ayepad.com), and thus figured it would make sense if I also separated out all the music related stuff from my personal accounts for social media. Remember, those “old” accounts are the ones I have accumulated over years, working in Digital Marketing/Strategy companies, often being the test-pilot for any and all new social media services that launch. I have lots of friends on all of them, and many of them couldn’t care less about my music. So I signed up for a new Twitter account. Sadly, “Ayepad” was already taken, so I had to settle for “Ayepadded“ “Ayepad Official”.
Getting a Twitter account is dead easy, and it is also quite easy to manage both my personal account and my new Ayepadded account within the same iOS app. The only problem I had was with the verification e-mails never arriving, and so I had to try a couple of addresses. They might have had a glitch I guess.
All Twitter-ed up I also figured I need to have a presence on Facebook for Ayepad. It is all really basic stuff, but you can find me here on Facebook. Please press “Like” if you feel inclined to do so.
Setting up a page on Facebook can be done from your regular account, and you can choose which “user” you are when you are posting on it. I also connected Twitter with Facebook, so any tweets I do from my Ayepadded Twitter accound will sync with that particular Facebook page, only, not with my personal timeline, and also not for any of the other pages I also manage.
Youtube
Setting up Youtube is tricky for anything that isn’t a person with a firstname/lastname. I had to register a user named “Aye Pad”. I haven’t planned how to use it fully just yet, if I should only release songs on there, or if I should use it for screencast instructions etc too, but time will tell I guess. You can find it here in any case. EDIT (20170102): It should also be noted that you cannot pick your own channel name until you have at least 100 subscribers on your channel, which is a shame. That makes it a lot more difficult to share nice-looking links for your channel.
Music stores and services
You can currently find me on the following stores/services (more are being added as I type):
Spotify Artist Page (please click “Follow”)
iTunes
Google Play
Amazon
Bandcamp
That is it for now. I will hopefully release another 6-10 songs over the year, some that aren’t brand new and some that are.
What other services am I missing? Is there something I should be on, or something that I’ve forgotten? Get in touch and tell me, I’ll try it out and will write about my experience here.